For 25 years, Sally Armstrong has been reporting on women and girls in conflict zones across the world.

The journalist, human rights activist and author was the guest speaker at a luncheon on Wednesday at the Chateau Laurier organized by Women of Influence, an organization focused on women’s advancement.

Armstrong discussed the shifts she’s seen recently for women and girls:

Much of your work is focused on international situations. What has been happening lately in your career?

I’m pretty excited about what happened in my career path. I’m a journalist, I cover zones of conflict from the point of view of what happens to women and girls. I’ve been doing this for 25 years and I haven’t had a good news story to tell. But now I do. Nobody was interested in these stories 25 years ago, 15 years ago. Now, these stories are headlines. The best example would be what’s going on in Nigeria.

How is the situation in Nigeria impacting you?

The kidnapping of these girls is a terrible story. But there’s another side to it: This is history in the making. Never before has any government, any army, any military, ever gone anywhere to rescue women or girls. When I heard President Obama, announcing the U.S. was sending the military and intelligence advisers, I thought “You just ticked off a missing box in history books.”

Why do you think a shift is happening now?

That’s what my new book, Ascent of Women, is about. Even the economists are saying the status of women and the economy are directly related. When one’s flourishing, so is the other. They claim the changes coming because of the shift in the status of women are so immense they’re likely to reduce poverty, cut conflict and bring a true accounting to culture and religion.

With #BringBackOurGirls, some attribute the attention to Twitter and generally the Internet. Do you buy into that?

I was involved with that from the first day along with women’s groups, especially Women Living Under Islam Laws. They began bombarding cyberspace with protests. So this was going on and the president of Nigeria, Goodluck Jonathan, was saying nothing. Petitioning in cyberspace led to the pressure on Jonathan to allow the U.S., the U.K., Israel, Canada and others, to come into the country to help find those girls.

In the areas you work in, does the good from cyberspace outweigh the bad?

That’s such a difficult question. I’m talking to girls in Afghanistan who are using Facebook — to quote them — “alter the emotional landscape of Afghanistan.” What are some using it for in Canada? Photographing body parts and sending it to friends. Cyberbullying is extremely worrisome.

When I did the research for my book, I tried to find out how this shift for women and girls started to happen. With the rise of Islamism in the 1990s, Asian women began to form groups. Then there was disease in Africa, with the HIV/AIDS pandemic, women realized they had no right to say “no” to sex. I thought maybe because these women formed groups, maybe that’s what caused the Earth to shift. But it wasn’t that. It was Facebook. It was when women started talking to each other all over the world that the world. Together, they started demanding change.

Why did your attention first turn to women and girls?

My career took a turn in 1992 when I was in Sarajevo doing a story on the effect of war on children. I started to hear rumours about rape camps. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing but I kept hearing from more credible sources. I gave the information to a large news agency in Canada and weeks later, the editor said he’d been busy and forgot. I said “20,000 women were gang-raped, some of them eight years old, some of them 80 years old, and you forgot?” I was the editor in chief of Homemakers magazine and I went into an editorial meeting, I told my staff what had happened and they said we should do the story. I did it and the reaction was so enormous, we had bags of mail coming in from readers demanding something be done. I decided then if no one wants to write those stories, I’m going to do it. I’m ashamed to admit this, but I won every award on the planet for this story. I was the first and only person to cover it.

What should non-journalists take from that?

When you’re chasing your career, you have some beliefs about what you can contribute, what you can accomplish and you have to, I think, believe in yourself. When I was writing these stories, my publishers hated them. I remember one saying to me “Tide doesn’t want to advertise on a page that has rape.” I said to him “Tide wants to advertise on the best-read page in the magazine.” I won the arguments because I had the readers. Fifty per cent of the population — women readers — wanted to hear these stories. The power brokers didn’t, but women did. Now everyone is talking about the kidnapping of the Nigerian girls. Things are starting to shift and women are poised to reach the summit. Stories about women matter.

Comments

We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to avoid personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful. If you encounter a comment that is abusive, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. We are using Facebook commenting. Visit our FAQ page for more information.